ABOUT ME
I'm Adi Soesan Malishev
Twenty years in product and technology, three at sea, and a coaching practice built on one belief: product thinking works for everyone, not just product people.
I coach the way I live: directly, warmly, and without pretending the hard parts aren't hard.
Now based in Spain, working with teams across Australia, the US, Israel, and Europe.
HOW I GOT HERE
From training pilots to coaching product teams
I joined the Israeli Air Force at 18 and spent three years as an F-16 flight simulator instructor. My job wasn't to teach pilots to fly - they already knew how to fly. It was to prepare them to handle emergencies under pressure, and to make sure the learning actually stuck.
The hard part was that I had a few hours to earn the trust of pilots who were older, more experienced, and not always convinced that an 18-year-old girl had anything new to teach them. I had to make them like me, trust me, and listen to me - in that order, in that timeframe. That was my first real education in how trust works, how fast you can build it when you understand what you're doing, and how quickly you lose people when you don't.
After the army I joined Elbit Systems, spending five years building defense training and simulation systems. Same world, different seat - now I was building the tools that other instructors would use.
From there I moved into the startups world. Twelve years as a product manager across Fiverr and Augury, joining both after Series A and staying through the kind of hyper-growth that changes everything about how a company operates. For most of those years I was the person making strategy land on the ground, pushing ideas up through stakeholders, working in the gap between what leadership decided and what teams actually did. That gap is where I learned the most about how organizations really work.
The biggest challenge of my career came during COVID. Augury's whole service model depended on engineers being on-site with customers - and overnight that stopped being possible. I led the task force. We rebuilt the offering in two weeks: short cycles, real customer testing, no waiting for perfect, all within the service team without an engineering pipeline. It worked. The company survived and secured Round D.
In 2022 my husband, three boys, and I left home and sailed the world for three years. I started coaching that same year and ran my practice from the boat the whole time. Running a coaching practice from a boat for three years taught me what remote work actually demands: clear ownership, no ambiguity, and the discipline to keep things simple when everything around you is moving.
That's still how I work. Most of my clients are remote teams. When they're not, I'm usually coaching them from a different continent.
"Sailing and product thinking follow the same rule: you set a clear direction and adjust to the conditions, not force the plan."
Everything I'd learned in the Air Force, in product, in years of working in the space between leadership and teams, and on the boat with my family coaching from remote kept pointing to the same things: clear communication is the foundation, trust is the infrastructure, and most teams are far more capable than their current way of working shows.
WHAT I BELIEVE
A few things I won't compromise on
Principles over methodology. Methodologies tell you what to do. Principles help you figure out what to do when the methodology doesn't apply. I'll share the principles I think matter and help you build the judgment to use them, rather than hand you a process to follow.
Processes should be treated like products. You build them, you learn from them, you adapt them. A process that doesn't change is one that stopped being useful. I help teams build working habits that evolve, rather than install systems they'll abandon when they don't quite fit.
Simple beats complex. Every time. If something can't be explained clearly, it's not ready yet. The goal is always to make the work clearer, and complexity is usually a sign the thinking isn't done.
Trust is the foundation of everything. Good decisions, good collaboration, good remote work - all of it rests on trust and the habits that build it. Most communication problems are clarity problems, and most alignment problems are trust problems.
You don't own the wins - the team does. You only own the failures. That's what leadership actually looks like.
A FEW THINGS WORTH KNOWING
I don't lead with credentials, but here they are
Featured by Marty Cagan / SVPG
My work was featured by Marty Cagan in his keynote 'Achieving Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People' - specifically the 'like me, trust me, listen to me' framework I developed during my service.
PLA Fellowship Mentor
I mentor at the Product Leaders Africa Fellowship, a program supported by SVPG, working with emerging product leaders across Africa.
4YFN Barcelona
I mentor at 4YFN, co-located with Mobile World Congress, working with deeptech founders, university spin-offs, and early-stage product teams.
OKR Quickstart
I work with OKR Quickstart, a Melbourne-based consulting firm, on product thinking and OKR implementation across their global client portfolio.
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
BSc in Industrial Engineering and Management, specializing in information systems.
Speaker & facilitator
I speak and facilitate on product thinking, OKRs, and remote work - drawing on three years of running a coaching practice from a boat as a digital nomad. For conferences, associations, and internal leadership teams globally.